Incitation | Amplifying F#

Why take the leap?

Contributing to open-source software, such as F#, is a way to reduce risk in using the language. By actively participating in the community and gaining knowledge about the dependencies you rely on, you can ensure that any potential issues or vulnerabilities are caught and addressed quickly. This not only increases the safety and reliability of your own projects but also benefits the broader community.

Furthermore, contributing to F# can increase the longevity of the language itself. By actively developing and maintaining a mature ecosystem around F#, it becomes more attractive to developers and more widely adopted. This, in turn, creates a positive feedback loop where a larger and more engaged community leads to even more contributions and improvements.

Another benefit of contributing to F# is the potential for gaining publicity by solving a problem in the community. By identifying and addressing a particular issue or challenge faced by F# developers, you can send a powerful marketing message about your skills and expertise. This can lead to increased visibility and opportunities for collaboration and networking.

In addition to the external benefits, contributing to F# can also be personally rewarding. By committing to fixing your own problems and taking an active role in the community, you can learn from a vast pool of developers with different backgrounds and perspectives. This can lead to new insights and approaches to problem-solving and provide valuable opportunities for mentoring and professional growth.

In summary, contributing to open-source software like F# offers numerous benefits, including reduced risk, increased longevity and attractiveness, improved publicity, and personal growth and development. So why wait? See it, say it, sort it, and start contributing to F# today.

What to expect?

We plan to organize hands-on video call sessions where experts and champions meet. A champion is someone or some organization that wishes to address an actual issue in the open-source space. The goal is to investigate as a group what can be done. Once we identified the problem-space we will try to compose pull requests wherever needed.

This allows us as a group to learn hands-on about various projects. Sharing knowledge and responsibility in the process. At the time of writing our collective hive-mind has expertise in the follow projects:

But this list honestly doesn’t limit us. If you wish to address a problem you have with a different project: we are all ears!

We wish to expand our hive-mind and become as diverse as possible. Grow a strong network in the F# community and at all times keep a winners mentality.

Education

When considering this initiative, it is clear that it can offer significant benefits for personal growth and provide invaluable education. You will have the opportunity to learn from various community members all over the world and greatly expand your knowledge of F#.

This initiative can be seen as an excellent follow-up training course for experienced F# developers. It can help you gain a deeper understanding of the software you are currently using and further enhance your skills and expertise.

Realistic expectations

Unfortunately, we must remain realistic about our capabilities. While we are motivated by incentives and good intentions, there are limitations to what we can achieve. Here is a brief summary of these limitations:

Our ability to influence existing projects is restricted by their current governance. It is not always possible to force a proposal that has been declined in the past, even if it is something that we really want, like “higher kinded types.”
As third-party contributors, we do not own or control most repositories. This means that our influence over the project may be limited, and we cannot demand that maintainers review our pull requests, for example.
It is impossible to know everything there is to know about each and every project, and there may be gaps in our knowledge. However, we hope to demonstrate how we can work around these limitations.
Some features may take time to implement. Just because we know how to tackle a problem does not mean that we can always move at a high pace. Open-source development requires patience and time.
While low-hanging fruit may be more feasible, it can still be rewarding to work on these issues and contribute to the community.